The Concourse
By Soney Antai
Corruption: Understanding a hydra
Because the statute is so vaguely worded, award decisions are habitually based on case law, the growing mountain of which is a hydra of rulings that point in so many directions that almost any decision can be defended or overturned on appeal, depending on how smart your lawyer is and which precedent he selects to argue your case.
2009, Kris Frieswick, Till Death Do Us Pay
The Greeks arguably remain green in the landscape of philosophy and science. Many years after the lushness of their intellectual empire receded into the horizon, there still remain appreciable relics of what was once a go-to domain in the realm of human knowledge, partly soaked in mysticism, surrealism and superstition. It is part of this superstition that birthed the mystique of the hydra.
There seems to be nothing in Nigeria today that represents the Greek hydra myth more fittingly than corruption. But corruption is a hypernym for a fandango of nondescript evil, which is why it is a hydra and therefore defies all attempts at nuking it. Of course, if you cannot operationally define a problem you cannot deal with it practically.
I pride myself as a good speaker of my mother tongue, but I am not sure of saying the same thing of this colonial language we have made a lingua franca with its cocktail of conjugation confusion. This is because it appears many words of this language are created with inbuilt entanglement wrapped in wooliness. One such word is corruption. If you ask me to give one word equivalent of that in my mother tongue, I don’t know what that would be. I wonder what you Concoursites would say it is in your own native tongues. But if I am to say what stealing, greed or self-absorption is, that would be a no-brainer.
The case with corruption is akin to the case of calling a spade a farm tool and thereby obfuscating its true meaning. So, what is the composition of corruption? It’s avariciousness, self-absorption, or put another way, extreme greediness or covetousness. This is what births malfeasance and misfeasance. It is also what drives stealing, armed robbery, kidnap, ritual killing, prophesying for profit, doctoring documents, harlotry, and election rigging.
Come to think of it: why would someone abuse their office? What does a public officer need 10 cars or houses for? Why are our capital projects receding in number and quality? For instance, a recent media report quoted the Minister of Finance, Mr. Wale Edun’s remarks on the 2024 budget performance. Part of what he said was, “Most recurrent expenditure items, which have achieved near 100% implementation, directly benefit only about 10% of the population. In contrast, capital projects in healthcare, education, infrastructure, and energy directly benefit the majority of over 200 million Nigerians.” Who are the “about 10% of the population?” They are the power and economic elite, who have constituted themselves into weevils and termites in the country.
These are those who divert defence funds into building private universities, going by Senator Adams Oshiomole’s recent outcry. These are people who would not mind fording the river of blood of their fellow country men and women to attain their religious, political and economic goals. These are owls who roam the haunts of darkness and wickedness. They are the folks who preach patriotism, but practise privatism. These are those of us who use religion as a cover for their personal agendas.
When Jesus Christ taught that we should love our neighbours as ourselves, He did that fully aware of our granite bent for self-absorption. He knew that our redemption lay in mind recalibration; a weaning off pleonexia. Sadly, among the captives of this vice are those who make so much noise about being His disciples. But such attitude shift is still possible if we would constantly remember that what makes a man is not the multitude of his possessions; after all, we brought nothing into the world, and will leave it with nothing.